I'm heading down to the
World Can't Wait protest/rally (against the new Military Commissions Law, torture in general, and torture of me in particular - all politics is local, they say, and I'm as local as I get) at the City/County building in a few minutes. I'll post an update if I come back. With over 225 rallies going on nationwide today, I doubt there's enough manpower to round us all up at once, so I should still have a few days to blog and take my dogs to the park before I'm extraordinarily rendited (rendoitered? renditionated?).
[Update] - I just got back from the downtown Salt Lake World Can't Wait rally. There were about 2 dozen people there at any given time, which is bigger than some protest rallies I've seen here but not as big as I'd hoped it would be. People did cycle a bit though, so all told there were probably 40 people in attendance. We were right on the corner of a major intersection, and we got a lot of honks and waves. We also got a lesser number of people giving us a thumbs-down or shouting at us to "Get a job." One guy mooned us. Another guy shouted "9/11 was an inside job!" as he drove by. Some people walking by on the sidewalk thanked us or shook our hands. One car full of four young women gave us two thumbs up and two thumbs down while stopped at a red light, and then we watched them get into a jabbering match among themselves. No one, thankfully, assaulted us in person. The signs we held up were a mixed bag, as they usually are: "Impeach Bush" and "Commander in Thief" mixed in with "Who would Jesus torture?" and "Fuck the police."
I'm a people watcher, so I was paying close attention to the people who drove by to gauge their reactions. The waves and honks of support were encouraging and the few loudmouths were amusing, but the rest of the people were the most telling: shakes of the head, clucks of the tongue, aversion of the eyes, or gunning the motor to get past us as quickly as possible lest we assault their fragile worldview. One of the protesters commented on that, saying the people who drove by in a daze were zombies with no political awareness nor interest in getting any. It's a sad fact of life here in Utah, though, that many people seek out an authoritarian system to tell them what to think and do and say.
When the LDS Church (or insert some other church name here, but that's what we've got in Utah) makes a pronouncement on a particular issue, one can usually expect the members to fall obediently into line. I was raised Mormon, so I can (presume to) speak on this with some authority: these are people who like being told what to do. They're raised that way from birth. They don't want controversy, they don't want "issues," and they definitely don't want to rock the boat. They enjoy and appreciate simple answers, even if those answers fall apart under the slightest scrutiny. They like order and hierarchy, where their place is known and understood and someone else will do the hard work of interpreting the complex world around them. This isn't inherently a bad thing; people naturally seek out some level of order and stability, or we wouldn't have nations or cities or religions at all. Some level of collective agreement is necessary to a cohesive society: we are all Americans; we agree to operate under the rule of law; we all drive on the right-hand side of the road when sober. The problem (as I see it) is balance. Too much order leads to intellectual sterility (which is a long scary topic all its own), and not enough order makes it very hard to get anything substantial or enduring done.
It's an abdication of personal responsibility, as it plays out here, to say "I support my leaders no matter what." You can call it craven or cowardly, but I think it's a matter of laziness. Thinking is hard, and coming to grips with a complicated issue takes dedication and research. Public schools don't give you the tools to think critically any more, so those often have to be developed from scratch. More than that, it takes a strong moral center, which many people who hide behind God's robes don't take the time to develop for themselves because their church has handed them a ready-made facsimile. I'm generalizing here, of course; I've known many Mormons who were liberals (more or less) and critical thinkers, but they were generally shunned or looked down upon (or occasionally excommunicated) by the other members and the church itself.
It's hard to get a message of dissent out to the public at large because groupthink kicks in so readily and the crowd reinforces its own beliefs to shield itself from the ripples of chaos. It's entirely possible, though, and I've seen it happen, to reach an individual person with your message. Dismantling a loud, powerful, self-reinforcing hivemindset is long, slow work; the hive isn't going to flip over en masse. You have to chip away at it one person at a time, and that's where dissenters come in. I'm not calling myself a hero for protesting, because I'm just doing what I think is right and necessary. I do think it's ironic, though, that we were told to get a job by passers-by; in my mind sending out those ripples of chaos to help restore balance to our society is one of the most critical and fundamental jobs in any democracy. I just wish it came with better health insurance.